Tuesday, July 29, 2008
`look into my eyes
and say you love me
________
1. What are the factors that lead to the extreme popularity of YouTube, especially with keen competition from other social network services like Wiki, Blogs and Facebook.
I personally feel that there are quite a number of factors that lead to the extreme popularity of YouTube especially with keen competitors in the market.
Personally, video sharing is the major factor to why YouTube is extremely popular. YouTube allows users to upload video and share them, allow others to comment on them and also embed the video hosted on YouTube on other web pages that you like, example blogs or personal websites. Searching a video that has been uploaded onto YouTube is also a breeze. By posting a video on YouTube, one can get various comments from a wide spectrum of people ranging from students to professionals. By entertaining the valuable comments that viewers give, one may improve their next video or even their current to a better state by implementing the suggestions or come up with another improvement that sparks from the suggestion or comment. Personal videos aside, some users even upload videos from a variety show that they think it is interesting and want to share with others.
In my opinion, if one starts to upload a video, another starts to watch and spread about YouTube, more and more people would upload their videos and watch videos uploaded by others and comment about them. This snowball effect also causes YouTube to be popular among the masses.
2. The article discusses some downsides to YouTube. How would you deal with these issues?
Copyrights have always been a problem for the uploading or downloading of internet resource. To prevent users uploading videos that will violate the copyrights of that video, YouTube may assign videos that have been checked for copyrights issues a “Checked” sign. For those videos that are uploaded recently and have not been “Checked”, YouTube can introduce a limitation factor to restrict users from abusing the use of video sharing. Although checking the videos one by one is very tedious, it beats having to be sued due to the violation of copyrights committed by YouTube users.
Regarding the issue of losing the videos uploaded onto YouTube being loss if YouTube goes out of business, I personally feel that the issue can be solve quite easily. Users who upload their videos unto YouTube should have the original video with them and they can upload the same video again on other video sharing websites if YouTube goes out of business. Plus, if YouTube really goes out of business, it probably can only mean one thing and that is people are no longer uploading videos unto YouTube and the videos uploaded are boring and useless. Therefore, it is not a big issue if YouTube goes out of business and the video content would be loss.
Regarding the issue of changing of the functions of YouTube will cause the link of the video to be non-functional, the problem can be easily solve by redirecting the old link to the new link and the video content would still be available to the user.
3. What would be the future direction for YouTube?. Refer to the sections “Where is it going?” and “What are the implications for teaching and learning” for some ideas.
The future direction for YouTube will be aiming at creative videos, music videos or even educational videos whereby the user learns by watching the video. It can be in the form of tutorials and stuff whereby the video teaches the user how to achieve what the user has in mind. For creative videos, YouTube encourages users to be creative in creating their own video and upload it onto YouTube. Music videos may also prove to be popular as many people have started to post their own versions of songs, some modifying the lyrics or singing. These videos can be posted on other personal websites and there will be more comments for that particular video. All these comments and uploading of videos will result in an active community whereby users gather around a common interest.
fragility`
6:14 PM